Review: Mexico Epcot Food and Wine Festival
We continue from China.
Mexico returns in the same location. It’s not actually at the top of the pyramid no matter what your friends tell you.
Food:
- Chilaquiles con Chorizo: Crispy Corn Tortillas tossed in Salsa Verde and Monterey Jack Cheese topped with Crema Mexicana, Queso Cotija, Pickled Onions, and Ground Chorizo – $7
- Taco de Ribeye: Shaved Ribeye, Red Onions, and Poblano Peppers on a Corn Tortilla with Ranchera Salsa, Cotija Cheese, and Chives – $7
- Capirotada de Chocolate: Abuelita Chocolate Bread Pudding served with a Chocolate Crème Anglaise – $5.50
Beverages
- Mexican Craft Beer: Tulum Artisanal Lager crafted with Citrus notes and made with Mexican Caribbean Seawater – 6 ounces – $5 / 12 ounces – $9.50
- El Tigre Margarita: Ojo de Tigre Mezcal with Pomegranate, Prickly Pear, Pineapple, and Ginger Juices served on the rocks with a Hibiscus Salt Rim – $11.50
- La Clásica Reyes Margarita: Centinela Blanco Tequila, Ancho Reyes Chile Liqueur, Abasolo Corn Whiskey, Lime Juice, and Agave Nectar served on the rocks with a Chile Piquín Salt Rim – $11
- White Passion Fruit Sangria: White Wine, Chinola Passion Fruit Liqueur, and a hint of Ilegal Mezcal – $10
Italy is to Mexico what is pain to my pocketbook, in that they never offer anything a second time, as you’d have to be half way to senility to order anything here at two consecutive Festivals, let alone 40. Remember the golden rule: You have a choice. I don’t. Hey, the menu is only $65.50 worth, or approximately half an individual pizza at Via Napoili with 14 toppings.
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Disney World Wait Times Update, Boo Bash Versus Not to Boo Bash, Early Entry, and Extended Hours
We’ll take a look at wait times over the last couple of weeks, check if Magic Kingdom is more or less crowded on Boo Bash After Hours dates, see about the best plan of attack for those attending the Boo Bash, and consider alternatives like the Early Entry and Extended Hours beginning in October.
Below is a chart of the average daily waits at Magic Kingdom over the last three weeks, organized by whether or not a Boo Bash is scheduled that day. The numbers only take into account waits during regular hours across our usual 17 attractions, since we’re interested in whether or not we need to avoid or hone in on Boo Bash dates for being more or less crowded:
The results, with event days and non-event days seeing nearly identical average waits, aren’t particularly surprising. Both types of days offer similar or the same operating hours and nightly showings of the fireworks. It’s likely that most guests visiting during the day have no idea whether or not a Boo Bash is scheduled, or at least wouldn’t identify it as a day to avoid given the fact that the offerings are the same.
An Irrelevant Visit to Adventureland at Magic Kingdom
In between posts with a lot of words, we return to an early morning visit to Magic Kingdom from earlier this summer. With so many changes coming up in the following four to six weeks, with Early Entry, Extended Hours, and Genie+/- all expected to launch by the first week in October, there isn’t much use in discussing touring strategy now, since there will be no way to replicate the current climate in just over a month’s time. That’s particularly true with current crowds at their lowest levels of the year. We’ll take a closer look when we get to Boo Bash versus Early Entry versus Extended Hours versus Disney Genie in what promises to be an obscenely lengthy discussion. Soon enough. Florida is diverting my oxygen too.
For a whole lot more on the wait time trends we’ve encountered at Magic Kingdom recently, see this post, with a lot of charts and graphs. For initial thoughts on how Disney Genie may transform your experience in the theme parks, see this post. And for the first Part of this series, which started even more irrelevantly in Frontierland with Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain, see this post.
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Considering the Disney Genie, Lightning Lanes, and Paid FastPass at Disney World
The website typically takes a wait-and-see approach to major changes that will impact our future time in the theme parks; the reality of a new situation, however poorly timed or worded Disney’s initial announcement might be, is rarely as calamitous as the immediate reactions of clickbait prognosticators or shouting Main Street DJs would lead you to believe; nonetheless, we’ll want to have our elbows adequately sharpened and poised for what the fall (season) is likely to bring.
Free FastPass+ service is out, supplanted by the introduction of the $15 per person, per day Disney Genie+ system, which the company has elected to bake into its existing Disney World app instead of launching separately. This was not the original intention, but with the company jettisoning the team programming the backbone behind much of the app’s functionality in early 2020, they were largely unable to secure the visas to bring anyone who knew what they were doing back into the fold when it was time to get going again in the middle of this year. That basically left them with an old TouringPlans programmer to finish the job. And, well, I probably don’t have to tell you how that turned out.
So what we’ll be served will look a lot like most of Disney’s offerings from the past ~18 months – a barebone system built to increase revenue, offer those willing to pay a premium the illusion of flexibility at ever-escalating costs, and get our eyes off of the rotting infrastructure and back on our phones.
If you’re ever trying to take a nap at the All-Star Sports, and think you might hear the distant, soothing hum of a gentleman whispering in the nonexistent summertime breeze, “refresssshhhhh…refresssshhhhh” it’s probably me irascibly screaming down the hall at my “interns” to secure me a better Genie selection so my day looks more efficient than riding Mad Tea Party for the third time in what should become part seven of a blog post series that we both know I’ll probably never get around to writing.
The whole thing is confusing and convoluted, accentuated only by a searing lack of detail – you know, like an actual release date, or what attractions will be offered, or if there will be an annual add-on for our precious blogging elite, or really anything that would imply this system is in any way worth more money, when the old way of doing things was clearly not. That leaves us with little to focus our energy on other than the notion that FastPass+ used to be free and isn’t anymore. And that seems bad.
Thoughts:
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An Irrelevant Visit to Frontierland
We probably need one more After Hours Boo Bash event to come to pass before we can arrive at anything resembling concrete conclusions about its impact on wait times at Magic Kingdom and the other Parks. Tonight’s event will also be the first Friday, with the two previous events falling on the ever-popular Tuesday.
We’ll have that third data point at the conclusion of the day. Tickets for the wintertime version of the event, the Very Merriest After Hours, are now on sale, here. While we wait for the clock to strike 12:30am, and prepare our precious wait time charts and graphs, we’ll simply enjoy a morning walk around Magic Kingdom from earlier this year. A simpler time. After we clear out these pictures, it should be back to the typed word.
